Leo Tolstoy COMPLETE CLASSICS the Kreutzer UNABRIDGED

Home , Anna Karenina, The Cossacks (novel), The Kreutzer Sonata, War and Peace

THE Leo Tolstoy COMPLETE CLASSICS The Kreutzer UNABRIDGED

CLASSIC FICTION Sonata Read by Jonathan Oliver

NA335612D 1 The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy read by Jonathan Oliver 7:34 2 The train moved faster and faster… 7:27 3 Chapter 2 5:40 4 ‘But you are talking all the time about physical love…’ 5:44 5 Chapter 3 3:23 6 Chapter 4 6:50 7 Chapter 5 7:47 8 Chapter 6 3:26 9 Chapter 7 3:02 10 Chapter 8 3:27 11 Chapter 9 4:57 12 Chapter 10 3:58 13 Chapter 11 8:55 14 Chapter 12 6:26 15 ‘It began during the first days…’ 1:44 16 Chapter 13 8:21 17 Chapter 14 7:35 18 Chapter 15 6:09 19 Chapter 16 9:37 20 Chapter 17 5:55

2 21 Chapter 18 4:58 22 Chapter 19 8:08 23 Chapter 20 9:10 24 Chapter 21 6:09 25 ‘Had I been pure, I should not have understood…’ 7:41 26 Chapter 22 3:49 27 ‘For the first time I wished to give physical impression…’ 3:45 28 Chapter 23 9:19 29 Chapter 24 6:14 30 Chapter 25 6:08 31 ‘Oh, I am afraid, afraid of railway carriages…’ 4:43 32 Chapter 26 5:09 33 ‘Previously I had doubted and thought…’ 4:56 34 Chapter 27 5:57 35 ‘When people say they don’t remember what they do…’ 7:26 36 Chapter 28 8:29 37 Afterword by the Author 8:38 38 How about the human race? 6:52

Total time: 3:55:49

3 Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) The Kreutzer Sonata

Leo Tolstoy holds a unique place in and the Church altogether. He wrote European – possibly world – literature. against the prevailing orthodoxy (political Many of his books have the unquestioned and religious) in a largely totalitarian state, status of masterpieces, and in Russia he is and it was only the extremely special revered as much as Shakespeare and Elgar regard in which he was held by the public are in Britain, or Goethe and Wagner in that stopped him from receiving harsher Germany, or Zola, Flaubert, Stendhal and penalties than bans. He took up the cause Debussy combined in France. But he has of passive resistance to evil, and would be a similar hold on the spiritual as well as an influence on Gandhi when the latter the artistic heart and mind, making him decided to adopt a non-violent approach almost a kind of Gandhi or Luther. This is in his attempt to gain independence for not just in a metaphorical sense, and not India. Tolstoy’s beginnings, however, just in terms of the fervour with which his were starkly different from the ascetic devotees adored his writings and followed conclusion. his actions; in the later years of his life He was born to the gentry, on the he became a figurehead for a new kind family estate, and educated privately of Christianity, and, having had his works before attending Kazan University. But banned by the secular authorities, he was even there he showed a displeasure at the excommunicated by the Church. way things were run and the courses were He cannot have been surprised – after taught – and he left before graduating. He all, he wanted to abolish governments was well-read and intelligent, but was also 4 in a position to enjoy considerable privilege, to found an experimental school on his which he did. His remembrances of this family’s lands), and began to write. dissolute time in his life later caused him Although he would never free himself profound distress and regret. His actions completely from the autobiographical went far beyond youthful indiscretions or in his later works, his earliest were quite drink-fuelled gambling and debauchery; specifically memoirs. They were not as there were duels and even a suggestion of comprehensive as his diaries, however. a murder. These he kept assiduously, and in a token It was a decision to travel with his of fervent honesty he showed them to his brother to the Caucasus that appears bride-to-be on the eve of their marriage. to have triggered a greater moral sense. She discovered not merely that he had had The countryside and especially the considerable sexual experience before he peasants and their way of life seemed to met her, but that he had fathered a child stir something profound in him. Warfare by one of the serfs who still worked on his would, too. He joined the army and saw farm. Sonya dealt with that, however, and active service during the Crimean War. And with much more besides. Their marriage, a final shift in his thinking was inspired by though it gave them 13 children, was trips to Europe in the late 1850s and early deeply unhappy, despite the evident initial 60s. Apart from giving Tolstoy a sense attraction. The honeymoon period lasted of the world outside the repressive and long enough for her to keep his business inward-looking Russia of the time, his affairs under control, which involved European experiences allowed some of managing his experimental schools and Tolstoy’s angry views to crystallise, thanks allowing him the freedom to write. The to the sympathetic understanding of literary world owes Sonya an incalculable other European intellectuals and artists. debt. While she was beside him, he wrote He determined never to serve the State War and Peace and Anna Karenina. again, started to believe in the possibility These two contain evidence of what of change through education (he went on were to become his later preoccupations

5 – pacifism, the corrupting capacity of how his initial love for his wife turned to government, the foolhardy conventions a bitter mix of desire and hatred; how that stifle people, and the dead hand of women’s dresses arouse men’s lust; and dogma that kills mankind’s relationship how music can inflame people’s passions, with God. even so much as to change their nature. These themes become more and more This is a matter that touches him deeply, explicit towards the end of Anna Karenina, since his wife met a violinist with whom she the theological one in particular. When would play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, he had finished Anna Karenina, Tolstoy and Pozdnyshev becomes ragingly jealous. began to shift away from the novel as a The opposing forces of his carnality and narrative form, and wrote shorter fiction, his desire for moral behaviour eventually essays, pamphlets, parables, and tracts drive Pozdnyshev to an act of explosive on art and religion. His shorter work also violence, for which he is seeking a kind of became more directly a reflection of his atonement. personal beliefs. The Devil, Father Sergius, Chekhov recognised the artistic How Much Land Does a Man Need?, The strengths of The Kreutzer Sonata; but Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Theodore Roosevelt didn’t – he said it Sonata were all written as a means of ‘could only have been written by a man of illustrating Tolstoy’s shift towards a more a diseased moral nature’ – and the book fundamental theology, which included was banned in certain states in America. an ascetic of self-denial. This did not stop There is a powerful irony in the idea of people from misreading The Kreutzer Tolstoy – who was trying to re-establish a Sonata, and seeing it as a call for freedom purer connection between God and Man from restraint. In it, the central character, – being chastised as a degenerate by the Pozdnyshev, is travelling on a train when Russian Church, by the Tsarist autocracy, he overhears a conversation about and by the democratic free-for-allers of love, marriage and divorce. He joins the America all at the same time. While The conversation, and is startlingly frank about Kreutzer Sonata seems extreme in its 6 expression of disgust at the nature of sex, and the furies it unleashes on marriage and lust, it still shows Tolstoy’s great strengths: his unbowed intensity of feeling and his grasp of what happens in people’s minds and hearts. The last 10 or 15 years of his life saw an even greater determination to follow the principles he espoused, and even greater deterioration of relations with his family. He was disgusted with the sophistication and falsity of his early work, renounced possessions and money, and eventually (at the age of 82) left home with a daughter and his doctor to fulfil a long-held desire to become a wandering ascetic. A few days later at a railway station, he succumbed to suspected pneumonia, and died shortly afterwards, still refusing to see his wife. His home became a place of pilgrimage, and in a sense it still is; for anyone who loves literature must pay their respects to Tolstoy. It is not what he would have wanted – but then nothing ever was.

Notes by Roy McMillan

7 Jonathan Oliver’s theatre credits include playing Claudius or Polonius in Hamlet and the Brother in The Seagull for the acclaimed Factory Theatre. His theatre work also includes two seasons at Shakespeare’s Globe, the title role in Theatre Point’s Corsican Hamlet at the Avignon Festival, and new plays at Nottingham Playhouse and Theatre 503. His radio credits include Roy McMillan’s production of Becket and The Girl at the Lion d’Or, directed by Frank Stirling. His recordings for Naxos AudioBooks include Ivanhoe and Descartes: an Introduction.

8 The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS catalogue

BEETHOVEN VIOLIN SONATAS NOS. 5 AND 9 8.550283 Jeno´´ Jandó, piano; Takako Nishizaki, violin

Music programming by Mike Shah

Credits

Produced by Genevieve Helsby Recorded at Motivation Sound Studios, London Edited by Josh Brooks Mastered by Mike Shah Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

Cover picture courtesy of Dreamstime.com

9 Other works on Naxos AudioBooks

Anna Karenina The Cossacks (Tolstoy) ISBN: 9789626341308 (Tolstoy) ISBN: 9789626341315 Read by Kate Lock Read by Jonathan Oliver

The Good Soldier Cousin Phillis (Ford) ISBN: 9789626341322 (Gaskell) ISBN: 9781843793540 Read by Kerry Shale Read by Joe Marsh

10 THE Produced by COMPLETE Genevieve Helsby CLASSICS

It is hardly possible to find anything of equal importance in conception and beauty of execution. Apart from its artistic merits which are in places amazing, we should be grateful for the story alone, for it stimulates thought extremely ~ Anton Chekhov

Chekhov was understating the case – no other work in Russia inspired such outrage as Tolstoy’s novella of desire and disgust, music and murder. Marriage is a hellish trap, lust the hideous bait, and music an aphrodisiac which rouses passions that are best left undisturbed. So says Pozdnyshev as he relates the story of his wife’s affair to his fellow train passengers. Radical in its dissection of conventional hypocrisies, and intense in its discussion of Tolstoy’s fundamentalist views, The Kreutzer Sonata was banned in Russia before its publication, and is startling even now.

Jonathan Oliver’s theatre credits include playing Claudius or Polonius in Hamlet and the Brother in The Seagull for the acclaimed Factory Theatre. His recordings for Naxos AudioBooks include Ivanhoe and Descartes: an Introduction. CLASSIC FICTION UNABRIDGED

CD ISBN: View our catalogue online at Total time 3:55:49 978-184-379-356-4 www.naxosaudiobooks.com